Cypress and Selenium are hot topics in the software testing field. What fundamental differences exist between Cypress and Selenium, then.

When it comes to automated testing technologies, software testers employ both Selenium and Cypress, both of which are strong options. Though each has advantages and disadvantages, which one is the ideal tool for your needs?

The best tool for your needs will be compared between Cypress and Selenium in this article. 

What is Cypress?

A front-end testing tool for the modern web called Cypress is entirely JavaScript-based. It attempts to alleviate the difficulties that developers or QA engineers encounter when testing an application. With its unique DOM modification method and direct browser operation, Cypress is a more developer-friendly tool. Cypress furthermore offers a special interactive test runner that it uses to carry out all requests.

The official documentation asserts that Cypress and Selenium are fundamentally and architecturally dissimilar.

What is Selenium?

As was already said, Selenium is a well-liked tool for test automation that automates web browsers. For more than ten years, testers have relied heavily on this open-source tool.

By combining the Selenium WebDriver library with a framework tailored to a particular language, it enables QAs to automate test cases for the selected browser. Before beginning the browser automation process, download the browser-specific driver.

The choice of programming language is also up to developers and quality assurance specialists. For several languages, including Ruby, Python, Java, etc. Selenium developers have created language bindings.

Compare Cypress and Selenium

Components

Selenium components

These are the key parts of the selenium:

• In order to simulate user flows for any web-based application, Selenium WebDriver is a collection of open-source APIs.
• Through its record-and-playback features, Selenium IDE, a browser extension, enables you to easily construct tests.
• Selenium Grid enables you to run tests concurrently on a variety of browsers, computers, and operating systems.

Components of Cypress

Its installation comes with two key parts by default: Cypress Test Runner and Cypress Dashboard. On a local system, one of them serves as a runner to execute our Cypress test cases, while the other monitors the progress of our Automation Suite runs.

Test Runner: It executes tests using a special interactive test runner that lets you monitor the application being tested and watch commands as they are executed. The test runner's important subcomponents, on which we should concentrate while running our test cases, are listed below.

• Test Status: The menu gives you a quick overview of the number of tests that have been passed, failed, or are still being administered, as well as how long each test took.
• You can trace any URL path with the aid of Url Preview, which displays the URL of your test.
• Set the viewport size for your app to test responsive layouts.
• Command Log: It displays the command logs as they are being run for each test that is run.
• View the test as commands are being executed with the app preview.

Dashboard Service: When running Cypress tests through your CI provider, the Cypress Dashboard is a service that gives you access to recorded tests. You can see information about what happened when your tests ran by using the Dashboard.

Flexibility

Cypress is an all-inclusive testing tool (as of version 6.3.0 it also comes with a recording tool). All you need to get started is an IDE (like Microsoft Visual Studio Code) and NodeJS installed because it comes with a testing framework (Mocha), an Assertion Library (Chai), as well as additional tools (JQuery, Test Runner, Recorder, Locator Playground). It only supports JavaScript as a programming language because NodeJS is used in its development, however it is incredibly rapid to deploy and get going.

Contrarily, Selenium offers a wide range of language bindings (Java, JS, Ruby, Python, C#), but after that, it is up to you to decide which framework you want to use (NUnit, XUnit, JUnit, BDD frameworks like Cucumber, SpecFlow, Mocha, TDD frameworks, etc.), which Assertion libraries you need (NUnit, Chai, Hamcrest, etc.), which browser drivers you need (IntelliJ, Eclipse, VS Code, Visual Dev Studio, etc.). Other possibilities include ProtractorJS, mobile testing with Appium, and others. Additionally, Selenium was created as an API that could be enhanced and integrated into other testing tools. Selenium is a versatile API that has good support.

Both programs are extremely simple to incorporate into the most popular Continuous Integration programs (TeamCity, Bamboo, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, etc.).

Reporting

Providing quality reporting is essential to effective test automation. JUnit reports and other common testing report formats are simple to implement in both tools because they both support standard reporting formats that can be read by other tools (like your CI tools). You can move through screenshots of each test step, read the console output, and even have the test run automatically videoed if you run Cypress Tests through the Cypress Test Runner, which by default offers excellent reporting (all built-in). In Selenium WebDriver, most of this is doable, but it necessitates additional dependencies & coding.

In addition, Cypress.io offers a limited free version of something they call Dashboard in addition to a paid edition. When we run a test suite on this in the cloud hosted by Cypress.io, we can log the results to the dashboard. The entire team may then access the dashboard, which offers summary and complete results from the test executions, both of which can be connected to Git commits. Really wonderful!

Skill Support

Considering the support you might require when creating and maintaining your test suite is a part of picking a web testing solution. The supporting programming languages and browsers may play a role in this. Additional testing may be something you want to think about (RESTful APIs, Mobile, Performance).

Due to the popularity of Selenium, there are a lot of developers and testers with such abilities available (but they may be language-dependent). Even though Cypress is a relatively new language, anyone with JavaScript knowledge should be able to take it up pretty fast since JavaScript is one of the top 5 most popular languages in the world.

It should therefore be simple to find reliable support for either tool.

Integration

Both tools may be accessed via the command line, making integration into CI tools a breeze. For example, if you're using Java, you might have your Selenium Tests contained within a Maven or Gradle project, which can then obtain dependencies to run on agent machines. In Selenium, the method used to accomplish this is language/framework dependent. To manage our dependencies, Cypress uses npm, which is nodeJS.

So both systems make it simple to manage integrations.

Conclusion

It goes without saying that one must consider the benefits and drawbacks of each choice before selecting an automation tool. This will enable a long-term assessment of which tool best serves the team and organization. Regardless of the test automation framework you decide to use for your web application, it is imperative to test the web application on actual devices and browsers for more accurate results.

You may access more than 3000 real device and browser combinations for a larger test coverage by running your Cypress or Selenium tests on BrowserStack's Real Device Cloud. As a result, you can detect and fix any problems that arise during testing under actual user circumstances. By utilizing parallel testing for quicker testing with extensive coverage, BrowserStack's Cloud Selenium Grid enables you to run cross-browser tests on various browsers and devices at once.